


To the Manor Passed

by Laura_Laplace



Category: Original Work
Genre: Erotica, F/F, Ghost Sex, Orgasm Denial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:35:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27262081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laura_Laplace/pseuds/Laura_Laplace
Summary: A manor full of ghosts that have not shed their earthly desires, and a living staff prepared to sate them...
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 1
Kudos: 29





	1. Upper Chambers, Ghosts of Women

**Author's Note:**

> This is part one of a little series going on over on my Patreon. If you like what you see, want to get early access or vote on what's to come, maybe check it out. Enjoy! :3

Everyone knew that the mansion was haunted, it was not a very well kept secret. 

Only a select few were ever allowed to pass from the mortal world within its halls, but they did so with a certainty few others could share. Perhaps it was a quirk of the grounds around there, some metaphysical contortion that made things the way they were, but the mansion produced ghosts, stamped shades out of those that passed away the way factories turned out hubcaps. Every room had an occupant, every hall and nook a spectral attendant, each one carefully picked by the lady of the house… and every one chosen for their talents in life. 

There were living attendants, of course, and guests of the Mistress that were not on death’s door, but they only interacted with the spirits when allowed to. Only the Mistress herself had full command of the shadow court she had put together, each shade offering her a deference that the living staff could only guess at. All they knew for sure was that dead eyes watched the living from every corner, impassive figures that bowed to one woman only. 

So when the kitchen maid spilled a dish, otherwise unseen during a dinner party, the only certainty was that she had been seen. The small, lithe figure of Eurydice slipping through the wall was more confirmation than discovery. 

The Mistress was waiting for her when her shift was finally over, the ghostly cat perched on her shoulder, fur exuding a gray mist that seemed to bend respectfully away from the lady of the house. Eurydice whispered into her ear, the language of the dead universal between species yet known only to a select few. The maid, Jasmine, did not need to guess to hard at what the cat was saying.

‘I’m to understand you had an unfortunate accident in the kitchen this evening, my dear?’ Tall, thin, the sort of woman who seemed to subsist only on evening cocktails and strong black coffee, the Mistress looked at Jasmine kindly, yet with an unmistakable edge of control that would not be questioned. ‘These things happen, of course, but I’m afraid redress will be needed regardless, dear. You understand.’

‘Y-yes, ma’am,’ Jasmine bowed her head, hands clasped in front of her. Employees far more secure in their jobs than her had acquiesced to far more onerous words, rather than cross the Mistress. Dead eyes, and more importantly, dead hands, were everywhere here. 

‘Good girl,’ the Mistress sighed, and a shiver went down Jasmine’s spine. Eurydice descended from the Mistress’ shoulder, padding off to someplace else, most likely not even within this plane of existence. Two other figures took her place, spirits in gray that did not yet have fully developed facial features or bodies; they were simply silhouettes, crafted of the mists from the other side of the divide between life and death. 

More than enough to handle one girl…

‘Let’s get you situated, then,’ the Mistress nodded, her ghostly retinue flowing through the still night air to take Jasmine by the shoulders. ‘Kind of you to be so understanding.’

Of course. There were rules to living at the manor (as opposed to dying there), and transgressing them always came with costs. That was the sort of thing one came to accept when they took a post here, the rewards for doing so worth everything the Mistress considered a punishment. Something deep inside Jasmine, a tightly coiled part of herself that had been binding tighter and tighter with each passing day in the Mistress’ service, ratcheted up the tension just a little bit more. 

The shades flitted a few paces behind the Mistress as she proceeded up the stairs toward the first floor balcony, rows of doors leading off into private rooms, each of which could be where Jasmine was to spend the night. She herself didn’t take a single step, her feet not even touching the ground as the manor’s ghosts carried her where she needed to be; Jasmine couldn’t help but glance toward every door they passed, replete with bronze name plates gesturing toward the nature of the occupant within. 

Names, dates of birth, and dates of death. A history wrought from grave markers and the things that lingered after. 

Mistress paced along the balustrade, gazing speculatively at one door after the next. Jasmine was familiar with a few of them, but not deeply enough to understand what might go on behind them. Some were already occupied, the sense of tension hanging behind their doors enough to signify this even if the sounds coming from behind them were not.

The seamstress had fouled up a stitch earlier in the day, and had been taken to the room of one James Heller, deceased as of 1952; indeterminate cries and the sounds of impact could be heard from within his room. The new sous chef had mistaken the Mistress’ coffee order this morning, his young, grunting voice audible from behind the door of Marco Alberto, passed in 1996 without once having let it stop him. The first floor rooms were the most public and, consequently, the most often used; the threat of them inspired ambition instead of apprehension. 

There were rumored to be other rooms, ones left off of the floor plans that the majority of the staff were familiar with… basement chambers crawling with specters beyond the understanding of the above ground employees, and attended by-

Well, Jasmine didn’t know for sure, but she did know better than to speculate. It did no good, particularly not in the minutes before a punishment was to be administered.

And there was, of course, the matter of the Mistress’ private chambers, a section of the manor so secretive that Jasmine was not even sure how many of the staff were even allowed inside. All she knew was that she herself was not, and that its exclusivity was not a rule made to be skirted.

‘Hmm…’ The Mistress was accustomed to taking her time, lingering before one or two promising rooms with deep thoughts etched into her angular face. Her dress swished about her ankles, suggesting the tapping of her heels that could not be seen from outside. Immaculately painted nails clacked together as, door by door, they approached the eventuality of Jasmine’s punishment. 

‘Remind me, dear:’ The Mistress said, turning to the floating woman with a kind of casual airiness. ‘What is it that you like? Ladies, gentlemen, or something else?’

‘L-ladies, ma’am!’ Jasmine stammered, a chill racing down her spine the moment one of her spectral guards looked down at her. 

‘Thank you, Jasmine. I wouldn’t want to pair you with someone incompatible for something like a kitchen mishap,’ the Mistress patted her maid on the shoulder. ‘You know what they say about spilled milk and the appropriate reaction to it, I’m sure.’

Having concluded that particular problem, the Mistress led the way down to the other wing of the balcony, the ghosts keeping pace and leading Jasmine along with them. Three doors down, the lady of the house stopped, sank deep into thought for a moment or two, before nodding, finally decisive. 

‘Yes, young Natalie, I think,’ she mused to herself. The doors seemed to react to the Mistress’ wishes exclusively, opening when a cleaning was assigned, rejecting all entrants when there was no need for a living person to be in there. When she herself touched them they opened without even needing to be pushed, swinging inward eagerly to admit her and her guests. Her shades floated Jasmine inside, depositing her on the lush carpet inside with a brisk fondness, vanishing almost the moment she had left their arms. 

Smiling fondly, the Mistress did not bother to verbalize her needs here, positioning Jasmine in front of her and beginning to untie the strings of her apron with a practiced touch. All around them were the soft furnishings of a profoundly comfortable guest room, dark wood trim over ashy gray fabric chairs, lace curtains billowing with the pleasant breeze coming in from outside. The Mistress hummed to herself as she worked, as though she wasn’t preparing a servant for a punishment that would be administered by a ghost. 

She slid off Jasmine’s apron, folded it carefully, and placed it on the dresser. By the time that she had turned back, Jasmine was already partway through removing her dress. 

‘Let me help with that, ma’am,’ she said, eyebrows raised with a gentle helplessness, an expression that seemed to suggest “oh well, what else are we to do?” 

‘Such a kind girl,’ the Mistress clucked her tongue, smiling. ‘I do hope she treats you gently.’

‘I’m sure she will, ma’am,’ Jasmine said, without truly knowing one way or another. Like most of the living staff, she had not been able to gain the measure of the vast majority of the spirits dwelling within the manor’s walls. Even so, she stripped off and stood, naked, slender, young, in front of the Mistress, ready to commit herself to the mercies of one such spirit for the duration of the night. 

Gesturing to the bed- a four poster affair wrought in black wood- the Mistress led Jasmine over and bade her to lay atop a comforter softer and more dense than anything the latter had used in her private life. Her dark brown bareness made a fabulous contrast with the cream of the sheets, and when the Mistress uncoiled the restraints that had been left wrapped around the posters, they were of a white and gleaming leather, padded within by red velvet. 

One limb at a time, the Mistress strapped Jasmine in, at wrist and ankle both, two additional straps going around the maid’s thighs just above the knee. Their ropes attached to the foot of the bed too, stretched apart enough such that Jasmine was unable to fully close her legs. A lesser woman might have taken a peek, lasciviousness or simple curiosity bidding them to look at Jasmine’s private dimensions, but the Mistress was lesser in no capacity. She bustled about, ensuring that her employee was comfortably situated, that the constrictions of the restraints were not in any way injurious, even that young Jasmine was adequately hydrated, before leaving her to her post and returning to that door, with its burnished nameplate. 

‘Do try to enjoy your evening, my dear,’ she said, nodding in a knowing, suggestive way before clicking the door shut behind her. The nameplate shone by candlelight, reading: “Natalie Auburn, 1854-1899.”

The ancient ghost was awake from the very moment the latch closed, the pressure of her gaze filling her chamber. Heat flickered along Jasmine’s bare skin immediately, the strange wash of emotions more than she could identify all at once; at base, the spirit was nothing but emotion, the soul a crucible for the ideals, affections, and anguishes of the human experience. Stripped from the body and left to its own devices for year upon year, distilled into a purer form than anything the crude flesh could produce…

To merely lay in the presence of an old ghost could be revelatory.

Jasmine gasped, the sound alone in a silence that rang through the room. Something creaked within the hidden geometries of the walls, bringing to mind old rumors of repairmen getting into the crawlspace only to come out reporting that several months had passed for them. Above a luxurious armchair that probably cost more than Jasmine’s monthly salary, a landscape painting in a heavy frame swayed once, side to side. The colors began to blend together. 

Natalie Auburn. A painter of some renown, passed away before her time with only a few surviving pieces remaining. Including the last she had ever painted, incomplete but worked on until the last evening of her life. Her talisman, as it were. 

Jasmine watched from the bed, her eyes wide as the divide between the hereafter and the living world blurred and bent. A dark shape resolved in the paints, coming closer and closer. It slid from the two-dimensional, slipped out and alit upon the carpet as though it were meant to be there. Something that lived there, and had done for over a century. The room itself accepted her, as much a fixture there as the walls themselves. 

Natalie’s image flickered and danced, a candle subject to some otherworldly wind that Jasmine could not feel. At times she looked all but human, pale of skin and dark of hair, with piercing blue eyes that shot through Jasmine just looking at her. At others she looked completely not of this earth, a blue mirage with a skeletal visage, a death mask made for the most beautiful of women. The alternation between states was a living thing upon her form, a flow of two worlds rising and falling with tidal rhythm. 

Slowly, coolly, the spirit turned her grave gaze toward the bound woman on the bed. Her eyes looked out from within sunken sockets, the contours of her skull drifting in and out of emphasis with the swimming spectral sweep of the afterlife on her countenance. Jasmine, spellbound, caught the precise moment that recognition caught in Natalie’s mind, the scene before her coming to make sense. 

The ghost smiled, the emotion of it working like a ripple across the surface of her face; humanity poured in, creating a visage more soft and refined than before, a raven-haired woman that was transparent and yet definitely, truly there. 

Her feet were bare, and they did not touch the carpet as she walked toward the bed. Dark hair flowed around her face as though in an uncanny, slow wind, her eyes luminous, ghostly lamps set into her skull. The foot of the bed did not stop her, calves passing through it as though it weren’t there at all, ambling with gradual steps up between Jasmine’s spreadeagled legs. Her approach was like ice, dripping slowly down Jasmine’s spine. 

Every inch that closed between them ratcheted up the tension in the maid’s bound body, until she was truly pulling at the restraints for the first time, entirely unconsciously. 

But the specter of Natalie did not stop short of Jasmine, immersing herself in the crude matter of the maid up to her thighs. She walked a line straight up between Jasmine’s legs, phasing through the lips of her pussy, striding through her genitals, walking into the woman with a look on her ghostly face suggesting that it was no great thing. 

Jasmine, however…

The mere touch of a ghost could be shocking, to have one walk into you a cold caress that moved and petted but never left. Jasmine stared at the spirit, her eyes darting from her bewitching eyes to the point where they joined, Natalie’s thighs and her own hips rippling and lapping at one another, as though they had both become liquid merely by coming into contact. Jasmine could no longer feel her legs beyond a reaching cold and a kissing, unnameable eroticism that verged on the unbearable. An intimate massage from fingers of snow, coffin velvet sliding along supple skin. 

Natalie simply stood in place for a while, inspecting Jasmine as she arched and strained against her restraints, toes curling with helpless sensation. Casually, she slipped forward, just a few inches, so that her legs shot through Jasmine’s abdomen and the plushness of her ass lingered just above the maid’s pussy. 

Her head cocked to one side. A ghost’s smile could be many things, but this one brimmed with the playfulness of the afterlife. The fun one could have with nothing to lose.

Floating on air, Natalie hopped up atop the crest of Jasmine’s pelvis, her backside coming to rest on her fully, though there was no weight to speak of. Her legs milled idly through the maid’s abdomen, with the air of a woman sitting poolside, trailing her feet in the water. She rested upon and within Jasmine, her demeanor idle and elegant, a lady at play. Leaning back, her long and phantasmal fingers played along the insides of the maid’s dark thighs. 

Intangible when they wanted to be, her nails played about Jasmine’s skin, pinpoint pressures that appeared and disappeared according to ghostly whim. When they finally found her pussy, they were all too real.

Silent, cold as night but welcoming as a lover’s embrace, the ghost slid her fingers through the very essence of Jasmine’s pleasure, catching not on skin or nerves but on something more fundamental, the parts of her soul that received it. A direct line to the core of her sexuality, bypassing the crude workings that those on the material plane must settle for to obtain satisfaction. 

Jasmine was robbed of breath immediately, her capacity for thought stripped away in the flood of pure connection that came with a spectral, interior touch. Natalie’s nails traced lines across her very nerves, pressing deep and eliciting a deep shiver from the bound maid. It had only been a few seconds, but Jasmine was already blushing, sweat beading on her brow.

And she had an entire night of this?

Everything came more readily to the essence than to the body, pleasure obviously, but climax too; Jasmine surged to the edge far faster than she ever had before, held there at the very tip of Natalie’s fingernails. The smallest of motions would have tipped her over, but the shade declined to give it to her, reaching instead for someplace else inside Jasmine. Leaning in, her arms trailing leisurely behind her like the tail of a comet, the ghost planted a kiss to the maid’s lips

A tongue like secret ice, buried in the true depths of a glacier, slipped into Jasmine’s mouth, carrying with it a wisp of the spirit’s breath, a moment in her story. 

All at once, understanding slid into place within the maid, the true nature of her punishment relayed in a spectral whisper.

Natalie Auburn had done her best painting in this very room, the windows open and the sunlight streaming in. To her the presence and interference of ghosts had been as inspiration, a peek into another world that she had tried to capture in her art. But of course, she had begun to create before discovering the manor, her habits developing long before her knowledge of the true afterlife. In this house where the dead watched, when ideas simply would not come to her and she had nothing else to resort to, Natalie would delve into her old habits, heedless of the spectral gazes. 

One could pour any sort of emotion into their art, and find particular emotions especially provocative for the purpose; Natalie had always found frustration a potent fuel for her own. Her eyes would often drift closed in this very room, fingers straying between her legs to seek the raw edge of a sensation that could provide that frustration. Her paintings had always been known for their… urgency, the critics had called it, a sense of need unfulfilled, of hunger for something that was being sought, but had not yet been found. 

If only they knew…

In the transition from life to death, that emotion had come to define her, had filled the shade of Natalie Auburn to the brim. She had become an avatar for that which had fueled her art, a being of the clarity and wild energy that her edging had produced. It had flowed from the tip of her brush for so long that, in time, it had come to fill the well of her being. 

The only hunger left in Natalie was the sexual hunger at the core of her art. Every remembered pleasure, every recalled retreat from incipient orgasm, flowed out from the tips of her fingers and into Jasmine’s living flesh. The soul, itself pure emotion, felt the edge of need far more keenly, something sharp that bit into the awareness until, in far too quick a span, it was all there was. Every second compounded, every moment an eternity lingering in the confluence of emotions that had formed Natalie’s burning inspiration. 

Jasmine understood the truth: arousal was the cruelest of muses. 

Natalie sighed as she broke the kiss, the chill of it lingering on Jasmine’s lips like a thin layer of ice. She sat back on the maid’s waist, a smile curling on her ghostly face as she caught sight of Jasmine’s wide eyes, the fundamentally stricken expression on her face. The scales had been lifted, understanding had been reached between the living and the dead: a rare occurrence indeed. 

It was, perhaps, the sort of event that only really happened within the confines of the manor; the living did not often spend much time with the dead before being driven away. For most there was something antithetical to existing in close proximity to the spirit world, a set of habits cultivated over a lifetime that had one fleeing from the supernatural. These were the sorts of impulses that the manor calmly, carefully stripped away with its court of shadows and servants from beyond, leaving behind those long nights when the dead might speak to the living in the language of their own experiences. 

Natalie would spend the rest of the night teaching Jasmine the motivating force of desire thwarted. 

Bound to the bed, there was no escape, and under the rules of the manor nobody was to come to her aid no matter how much she screamed. The ghost took her time exploring inside and out, beginning first with cold fingers against her pussy, but quickly graduating to showing the length and flexibility of her tongue. There were places inside of Jasmine that had never been touched before that Natalie, capable of swimming through the matter of her body as easily as air, could reach with no great effort, and she took advantage of every one. 

Places impossible to physically reach from outside, ones all too close to points of discomfort from the angle tangible matter would have to approach from, to say nothing of the sections of the woman’s soul that had languished without the touch of another until tonight; Jasmine found herself assailed from angles she could not possibly have prepared for. Natalie possessed a delicate touch and an expert sense of the feelings that brewed within a living body, knowing precisely when it was safe to lay in with the stimulation, and when to pull back, leaving Jasmine to shiver with neglect, mewling for release that would never come. 

Even if she begged, every time she looked down to entreat the woman currently tonsil deep in her pussy, all that looked back were the semi-transparent eyes of a spirit, the cool gaze of a woman now beyond any of the things that Jasmine could give her. From beneath that heavy fringe of dark hair, all Natalie expressed was a kind of quiet amusement, the demeanor of a teacher imparting a mildly difficult lesson to an apt pupil. 

The night wore on, though it was hard for Jasmine to accurately gauge it, her mind consumed solely with the sensations of her body, the unbearable tightness of her nipples, the way her wetness leaked out from her despite the active ministrations of Natalie’s tongue. Her mouth hung open, breaths coming in sharp, desperate pants, a blush darkening her skin from cheeks to cunt. Her wrists ached, the effort of pulling on her manacles becoming painful long before she gave up doing so, the needs of the body so much more pressing than her rational mind’s sure knowledge she would never be free of them before she was allowed. 

The moon rose outside the window, sliding out of view before Jasmine knew it. Not that she had been watching it closely; Natalie had a number of tricks up her dead sleeves, each of them enough to knock Jasmine back on her ass the moment she felt like she could become accustomed to the ghost’s attentions. 

When eating her out with spectral lips began to become old hat, Natalie adjusted her position, sliding one soft, pale thigh between Jasmine’s legs and capturing one of hers with the other, grinding their pussies against one another’s leg. Her ghostly clit felt like a tiny chip of ice, drawing a line up and down the dark skin of Jasmine’s taut thigh, tingling and frustrating in her certainty that, if the specter desired it, she would be allowed to cum. 

When grinding stopped amusing her, Natalie flitted silently through the bed, lurking beneath it in a place beyond Jasmine’s view. Her fingers would slide up through the mattress, running tickling circuits of the small of the maid’s back, the sensation of that alone almost enough to drive her mad; no matter how she pressed her back to the bed, where she twisted or what she said, there was nothing that could block Natalie’s touch. The ghost could not be opposed, physics simply didn’t apply. 

Caresses, thus, gave way to kisses, licking, love bits delivered unseen to whatever intimate place Natalie desired. She could run her tongue along Jasmine’s nipples from a position inside the maid’s chest, slip her nose into the hollow of her navel without ever coming out from behind her back. If it ever seemed like Jasmine’s arousal was beginning to subside, her pussy was mere inches away, ready to be assailed by the revenant’s mouth in more ways than she could ever had thought possible. 

But again and again, Natalie returned to a singular gesture that seemed to Jasmine freighted with meaning. As the maid’s pussy drooled liquid arousal, the ghost’s head would bob up between her legs, that long tongue slipping between Jasmine’s lips to taste deeply of of her juices, her eyes burning blue and never leaving Jasmine’s. 

There was a deep, abiding satisfaction to be found there, a creative spark stoked there that the maid could easily imagine had once been directed at a canvas. 

And so it went. Tireless and relentless, Natalie Auburn stimulated the far younger woman through the night, drawing her only to the very edge of climax before drawing her back with tender, frustrating patience. There was something… matronly to it, in time, an affection that struck Jasmine deeply. This was for her own good, it seemed to say. 

Morning came, sleepless and trembling, the maid blushing furiously and slack in her bondage. She had long ago given up on trying to get out, or appealing to the ghost’s better nature; there wasn’t one, she had come to discover. Only a desire to frustrate, a lingering will to edge. The things she had valued in life, distilled to pure perfection in death.

The ghostly residents of the manor, generally, faded back into the hereafter with the morning light, but Natalie had kept an eye on the sun as it rose, its beams slanting in through the window. She kept up her teasing until the last possible moment, before taking that last second to settle herself more completely into Jasmine’s body than ever before, not just floating through the matter of her form but situating herself into the seat of the maid’s soul. 

Her nerves could be stimulated many ways, edging was just one. Natalie’s last act before possessing Jasmine’s body was to flick open the latches on her restraints, freeing the maid for a scant second before control of her limbs was robbed from her. 

She sat up, both experiencing the act as herself, and disconnected from her own body. It was a disconcerting thing, but before all other sensations was the throbbing of her need, the desire to dive between her legs and bring herself off that had dominated her mind the entire time that Jasmine had been bound. Even possessed, her shell within the control of another, the need to masturbate was all encompassing. 

And Natalie, in her head and seeing her thoughts as her own, obliged. 

When Jasmine moaned, it was with her own voice, control over her mouth returned to her even as her hands remained in Natalie’s. She could feel her fingers slide into her wetness, though the actual motion of it was out of her control. She was tight around her probing digits, wet walls flexing against a touch that moved in ways unexpected to Jasmine, a toy controlled by another even as she felt the sensory feedback of it. 

Shuddering with need, Jasmine followed the sensation as far as she could, desperately following the rising of her pleasure, willing Natalie to take her over the line this time, just this once, the night was over, her punishment was done, surely, please…

Please…

There was a hardened part of her, already attuned to the manor so deeply that she could scarcely envision working anywhere else, that knew the truth. But this was different, wasn’t it? This was that little slice of sunlight that Natalie had carved out for the two of them, the culmination of the time they had spent together; it was what all of that frustration had been for, right? Why build it up, if not for the eventual release?

It had to be different this time…

Of course though, once that coiled heat had reached its apex, at the very moment even a second longer would have been intolerable and the pleasure threatened to burst its dam completely, Jasmine’s fingers withdrew. She could feel Natalie’s influence upon them, as though the ghost had taken gentle hold of her wrist and pulled her away, the tips of her fingers still dripping with her own juices. 

Jasmine could feel her heart racing, the double-time thumping pulsing in her clit, her nipples, thrashing in her chest in a way that was light inside, yet heavy in her ribs. A sort of panic, based in the absence of even the familiar teasing she had grown accustomed to overnight. There was stillness everywhere but the slick, shivering confines of Jasmine’s body. 

Outside could be heard the sounds of the manor waking up, distant, sparse clangs from the kitchen, the soft footfalls of servants stepping into the halls for the beginning of the day. They had never seemed more sectioned off from the reality Jasmine inhabited than they did now. 

Slowly, Natalie drifted out from her, a floating vision wrought in snow whites and cool blues, coming to rest on the foot of the bed with her legs crossed. Her gaze steady and patient, she tilted her head and regarded the maid with a question in her expression.

“Well, what will you do now?”

There was the obvious, instinctual response to finally becoming free, of course; Jasmine’s every nerve screamed for her to obey the impulses that had been denied for so long, to squeeze her thighs together and fuck herself to the screaming orgasm that was, in fact, her right. It would have been simplicity itself to do, and though Natalie Auburn’s ghost lingered just ahead of her, easily capable of stopping her, Jasmine had the distinct impression that she would not intervene, not this time. 

She was interested in seeing what the maid of the manor would do of her own free will.

Jasmine’s hands lingered on her thighs, fingers edging closer to their insides for seconds at a time, the temptation a lot to bear all at once. But there was something giving her pause, a tenet of life at the manor that she had stuck to assiduously before; the Mistress was the one that decided things like punishments and duties, not the staff. The manor was not a vertical hierarchy so much as it was a sheer cliff with her the sole occupant of the top. 

Even the dead deferred to her…

Primly, in keeping with every ounce of her training, Jasmine folded her hands in front of her, ignoring the hungry heat of her pussy and the frustrated tears welling in her eyes. She returned Natalie’s gaze: they were, after all, both attendants at the manor. They could see each other, at least here, as equals. 

Natalie inclined her head, looking somewhat impressed. Getting to her feet through the matter of the bed, she moved to the door without actually moving at all. There she stood, a few inches off of the ground, waiting patiently as Jasmine undid the restraints at her ankles and stood for the first time in hours. 

Her muscles ached, and Jasmine had to work some feeling back into her toes, but Natalie waited patiently, still shaded from the rising sun. It was only when she went to retrieve her uniform that the ghost moved, sliding across the floor to get between Jasmine and her clothes, pale head shaking. 

What task Natalie intended to take her to next, it was apparently a specific one with a dress code different from the usual.

Heart racing in her chest, her pace rapid and jittery to keep up with the ghost that was her only pretext for being out in the manor’s public spaces nude, Jasmine forced herself to hold her head high and keep her posture in keeping with the Mistress’ expectations. There were others about, of course, her seniors in the work to which Jasmine had pledged herself, but they paid her no special heed beyond the usual quiet greetings. As befitting an early morning where the only activity within the manor was the work itself.

Natalie’s shade led her away from the main hall, toward the back of the house where few even of the staff where allowed to go. Jasmine’s bare feet moved on carpet softer and more plush even than the expensive ones in the front of the manor, propriety demanding that she keep her eyes forward, her job to follow to her next task, not to explore, or take in the decorating. 

By the time she had been led to the Mistress’ chambers, Jasmine was thoroughly lost, the only sense of the space she now occupied in her head the direct route retracing her steps back to Natalie’s room. A journey she would, she realized only then, have to take back naked, should the Mistress not see fit to provide her with a uniform inside…

And that was where she was going, Jasmine was certain of that now. The ghost turned just long enough to beckon Jasmine to the door, before fading away, the daylight finally taking its toll and sweeping the night ghost from the realm of the living. If she were to return tonight, there was no assurance that Jasmine would see her again anyway, and though the primary emotion that notion elicited was relief, there was perhaps a tinge of sadness in there too. 

She had come closer to understanding one of the departed residents of the manor, after all. That itself was worth mourning.

But only for a moment, of course. The maid had a job to do, and her Mistress was waiting. 

… Still, her fingers trembled, as they reached for the knob to a room few others had ever entered…  
***

To be continued.


	2. Board of Directors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jasmine learns the truth of the haunted manor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's chapter two, previously released only on Patreon for my members! If you like what you see, why not come check us out? I do polls, story requests and more.

Jasmine felt spectral eyes upon her from the moment she approached her Mistress’ door, knew ahead of time that it would be the most watched room in the entire manor. The things that watched from the corners now, though, could not have been tethered to any specific room, were not ghosts in the same way that the denizens of the outer chambers were; Jasmine doubted that they corresponded to any given individual living being at all. More likely they had simply… always been there.

The door was not locked, though Jasmine would not have been surprised at all to learn that it had been, right up until the very second she had touched it. It glided open for her, the space within a simple anteroom, deep red carpet laid over dark wood trim, other doors leading off into more of the Mistress’ chambers on every visible wall. 

It stayed that way until the maid crossed the threshold. Only then did the boundaries of normalcy begin to blur. 

It felt very much to Jasmine like she imagined vertigo must feel like, a dizziness beyond mere disorientation that hit her in waves and, by degrees, altered the way the room around her seemed. The floor fell away first, carpet literally sliding away beneath Jasmine’s bare feet, descending as though it were the facade of some set, changed as the scene transitioned from one to the next. Jasmine herself remained in place, standing now on air as the plane of the carpet began to drift and spin below her, something that had never been moored to anything at all, no earth, no reality, nothing but the momentary illusion, now gone. 

Below her were stars, throbbing in a dark sky that she had never seen before. The sensation of standing normally but with nothing at all to take her weight was somehow more upsetting. 

The walls blurred, the doors along their surfaces coming together, slithering around corners to meet and draw into a single point, the sight like a drug-induced hallucination made real. It even opened wrongly, sliding upward like the eyelid of some terrible third eye, revealing the Mistress herself within. 

Standing on nothing, the Mistress looked resplendent, clad in a black robe that clung to the thin curves of her body, the depth of color within it stunning and unreal, reminding Jasmine of those experimental pigments that absorbed light. Just looking at it felt like looking at something that had been photoshopped poorly. 

‘Ah, good morning, my dear,’ the Mistress smiled from the thing that was once her doorway, the background of the room behind her little more than a churning mass of light. ‘How was your night? If you’re here then it can’t have been too strenuous on you, none of my attendants would let you in if you hadn’t impressed.’

Jasmine did open her mouth to answer, but the Mistress hardly seemed interested, turning back to the chaos of the space behind her. Her robe’s long black tail followed along behind her as she went, descending further into this space that was not the manor anymore as she did. Naked but not cold, tentative but no longer frightened of what she would find within the Mistress’ chambers, Jasmine followed. 

Once the strangest things had come to pass, what did one have to lose in going further in? 

The walls continued to blur as she approached them, each step a fight between her trust for her Mistress and the simple observation of empty space beneath her. The door frame persisted the longest, but it too dissolved into the interplay of light and dark that had been slowly swallowing the room since Jasmine had entered. Stepping through the second threshold and into the Mistress’ chambers proper replaced the chaos with something more orderly, if no less confusing to look at. 

A cauldron of stars below, spiral stairs wrought of thin and delicate glass descending into its midst. The Mistress was now more than halfway down, closer to the bottom of the celestial tower that had somehow come to rest, penetrating down through the middle of a two story building. The light of it all shone blue and white as Jasmine began her descent, through the layers of nighttime that had settled around her; starlight ran in rivulets over the brown bareness of her skin, a thousand luminous eyes gleaming out from the void. 

She followed the pure black cape behind her Mistress down into the depths, its trail cutting a swathe of nothingness through the inexplicable stars. For a while there was only the sound of footsteps, her Mistress in heels, but eventually other noises rang out through the dark; songs that had no names, the clanging of distant bells cast from unknowable metals. 

It became clear to Jasmine that the things she was descending toward were not stars at all, but points of light that were something else entirely. She had been in many rooms populated by ghosts before, she knew the feeling of unseen eyes drawing down her body, and drawing closer to these strange constellations, walking steadily toward the stars felt very similar. Something like a photo negative of the specters she was used to; luminous where the manor’s ghosts hid in shadows, open in their surveillance, singing their existence to the world. 

Insofar that what was down here, this vast and draining void, could be considered a part of the world above…

Reaching the bottom was like falling to the floor of a star-spangled well, surrounded by light that glimmered and moved, the very touch of it upon Jasmine’s skin like the touch of the ghosts upstairs. Mistress seemed to move through it all unrestricted, the light glancing off of her robe as though it were trespassing, but for Jasmine the experience made it difficult to even walk straight. After an entire night of spectral caresses her body was overly sensitive and the ghostlight uncaring where it touched her; even the smallest of motions across her bared form seemed to her like a deep kiss.

‘Do keep up, Jasmine dear,’ the Mistress called over her shoulder once she overheard her maid panting to herself. It felt like the sound should echo in a chamber so large as this one, but it did not, instead sounding as though it had been whispered directly into Jasmine’s ear. ‘Time doesn’t flow the same in here as it does out there, but I don’t like to be kept waiting either way. You understand.’

The stars stroked at Jasmine constantly as she walked through them, light that kissed and licked at her skin with a distant intensity she could not fully describe. She forced herself to continue in Mistress’ footsteps, though the temptation to stop and sate her aching pussy on even the cool regard of starlight was overwhelming. But the watching lights were just as much a part of the manor as the human ghosts above, things that, through one process or another, bent to the Mistress’ will; not a one of the spotlights that breathed across her clit, or worshiped temporarily at her nipples, gave up enough pressure or attention to bring her over the brink that Jasmine had been on since the night before. 

That didn’t stop them from gathering focus as she progressed deeper into this hidden cosmos, however…

The stars knew where to shine on her, their wandering lights honing gradually in on the centers of Jasmine’s pleasure; her chest, between her thighs, even the well of her navel, where she had always been secretly sensitive. There was no way to deny these twinkling eyes their sentience anymore; whatever they were, and whatever they intended, those lights were alive, observing.

Weighing up Jasmine as she walked, naked, into their midst. 

When the change happened, the transition from one space to another, it did so instantly, almost randomly. The stars surrounding them flickered, changed color and rearranged themselves; suddenly the staircase they had descended was gone, the floor a flowing celestial river cast in the same pale blue as the stars themselves. They thronged now behind the Mistress, a single wall of glittering sapphire, marking out the sheer darkness of the lady of the manor’s silhouette. 

The Mistress allowed her robe to fall open, and within there were more lights, things that coiled and uncoiled. In their closeness Jasmine could see what they really were. 

The lights were the smooth, glassy surfaces of countless sinuous tentacles, writhing in the dark spaces of the Mistress’ clothes. They were eyes, and hidden, speaking mouths. 

Every star was alive, and down here, in the heart of the manor, they composed something like the board of caretakers for the spectral throng above. 

A curling tide of strange flesh, tentacles uncoiled from within the Mistress’ robe, fanning out like the tails of her robe, veils of starlight that moved according to their own internal rhythms. They curled about her feet, drew up to drape themselves over her shoulders, rose to frame her rail thin body with a writhing, twinkling background. She stood in its center, its fulcrum, as though she had been born to be there.

‘Welcome to the true manor, Jasmine.’ The Mistress did not smile, but her expression was at peace in a way the maid longed to replicate. ‘We don’t invite many down here, but those we do… let’s say that my employers here can see their potential from the first.’

‘Potential, ma’am?’ Jasmine’s voice lay thick and strained in her throat, the physics of the chamber itself working to drag down and distort the words the moment they left her. It was the first time she had spoken since entering, and the lights brightened to hear her.

‘A place like this doesn’t just work, dear,’ the Mistress said. ‘The departed up above, they exist as they do due to the largesse of my employers, and that takes effort. So when my paymasters, with their… wider field of vision, see someone upstairs who might be of use to our little operation, in time, they want to meet them. They want to meet you, dear.’

‘I… suppose I am at their service as I am yours, ma’am.’ Jasmine would have curtsied, had she been wearing anything with which to do so. 

‘Precisely the kind of answer that will make you big in this business, my dear.’ Clapping, the Mistress let her robe fall open completely, revealing a pale strip of a body beneath it, all but dwarfed by the immensity of the tentacled creature that… what, exactly? Clung to her back? Inhabited the inside of her clothes like some kind of symbiote? 

It was impossible to tell.

‘I am not entirely sure what sort of business you’re bidding me enter, ma’am,’ Jasmine answered, tremulously. ‘I’m sure you can appreciate this… it’s not something I can readily identify.’

‘Of course! But I’m sure you didn’t believe that a house full of ghosts just happens on its own. Somebody needs to look at the boundaries between life and death and think to themselves, “well, that won’t do at all.”’

Oddly enough, this idea was more dizzying than the alternative, that the manor had just been a piece of luck, untouched by thinking agents. That there were things that could even detect these sorts of things, let alone consider them malleable and within their power… Jasmine reeled to think of it. 

And they wanted her?

‘Come. Join our little commune,’ the Mistress extended a hand, her nails immaculately painted and her forearm squirming with crystalline tentacles. ‘It wouldn’t even occur to my employers to use a vertical hierarchy here. We all just… are.’

The Mistress had never been overly familiar with her employees, the rather personal nature of the manor’s punishments notwithstanding, and so to see her offering her hand now froze Jasmine in place for a moment. The fact that she herself was naked beneath her robe- and Jasmine had not even thought to sexualize her yet- was only an afterthought, the simple intimacy of her fingers outstretched, clasping at her maid’s as Jasmine reached out and took that hand…

… She hadn’t even thought about it, but very quickly, it was done, and the Mistress’ soft grip guided Jasmine closer, the stars at peace and silent all around them. 

‘Good girl…’ Mistress spoke in a whisper, lights trailing over her skin, Jasmine’s, the encouraging caress of starlight drawing them ever closer, until her tentacles could reach out and embrace the maid. 

They felt like silk and the rays of a spring afternoon sun. 

Around her calves and forearms, her midriff, her neck, the tentacles curled about Jasmine’s body and drew her the rest of the way in, not to the Mistress herself but past her, closer to the collection of lights that served as the foundations of the manor. They curled inward toward her, a tower leaning in to inspect its prize as she approached. She had never felt more like a butterfly pinned under glass than she did in that moment, inspected by countless inscrutable intelligences and worse, in the course of a literal job interview. 

And she was naked. Jasmine was pretty sure she had had nightmares about this.

The whispering of many voices began to brew in the back of her mind, drowning out her Mistress’ approaching footfalls, sweet and bright sounds that touched her hindbrain and stoked feelings of fascination within the young maid. There were not words there, exactly, or if there were, not in a language that Jasmine could understand, but the meaning came through in bits and pieces, fragmentary and drifting through the dark of her mind.

Mistress appeared beside her head as the tentacles held her, slithering over her body in warm waves, impossible to predict. They bore Jasmine up as the ghosts above had the night before, off of her feet and closer to the collected spotlights of the board. It was clear from the outset that the Mistress would only have a partial role in what was to come, but still she laid her hands on Jasmine’s shoulders, comforting and unconcerned at their shared nakedness. 

Jasmine, not knowing where in the glare bearing down on her to look, turned her eyes to her Mistress’. Tentacles roiled at the borders of her slim form, touching her far more intimately than they were touching Jasmine; a pair of them, thin tendrils the lengths of Jasmine’s fingers, slid constantly over the tiny A-cups her employer bore, teasing the rounded pinks of her nipples, flitting over the slight curves there. More curled between shapely thighs, over her abdomen, several seemed to move inside the Mistress, active between her legs in a way Jasmine could not entirely see from her position. 

‘We’ve made a house of ghosts together, they and I. And they wanted to meet you…’ Trailing, intimate fingers ran down Jasmine’s body, strange counterpoints to the slithering tentacles. ‘Who knows? You might be the one to find out what they really want…’

A delicate tip flicked over Jasmine’s clit, overworked and still sensitive, and she bucked in the tentacle’s embrace. Like water, the starlit tentacles moved with her, accepting and flowing around her motions so that Jasmine moved in space not an inch, no matter how she struggled. Patient and serene, the Mistress looked down at her, listening to her maid pant and squirm. When the spasm subsided and Jasmine stilled, the arch and royal woman leaned in and pressed her lips, just for a moment, to Jasmine’s. 

After the night she had had, the maid opened her mouth instantly, accepted her Mistress’ tongue inside.

‘Goodbye, dear,’ patting her on the cheek, the Mistress stepped aside and surrendered her maid fully to the tentacles. If Jasmine had had the time to consider her words she might have been alarmed at the finality of it, but the squirming length between her legs went back to work before she had the opportunity. Thin and sinuous, it slid between the puffy softness of her labia, its tip looping around her clit and holding tight to it. 

The result was only a gentle touch, not penetrative in the least, but more than enough to take Jasmine’s breath away. The tentacle tugged, both drawing its length down the insides of her lips and pulling hard on her hooded, sensitive bud; Jasmine cried out, the sound swallowed immediately by the light that surrounded her, her pussy surging upward toward that familiar edge of climax. 

Her dripping hole knew exactly where to go, and the warm, celestial touch of the thing working between her legs drew her toward it so very, painfully easily. 

Slowly, with a casual air that truly drove home how much of a specimen on a table she was, the board drew Jasmine upward toward their now swirling central mass. The bowed constellation of watching stars drew their luminous gazes down her bareness, spotlights that swept along Jasmine’s body like hot, loving tongues. Her toes curled, chest rising and falling with panting, desperate breaths as every moment drove her closer to orgasm. 

The light grew in her vision, achingly reminiscent of the pale, eerie glow of Natalie’s specter in the night. The response Jasmine had to it was almost Pavlovian, her pussy clenching down around nothing as she began to anticipate the cruelty of denial one more time. She rose, the board’s whispering voices so close to coherence now, their glow all-encompassing, now a singular stroke that covered and teased her front, dark skin flushed with heat and sensation. 

The tentacle at her cunt tugged her upward in waves, its glassy surface now slick with her juices and clasped around a swollen clit free of its hood. Her moans began to take on a whining, pleading edge, unsure of whether or not the lights could even understand her tone.

She was close, closer than she had ever been, a mere moment away from tumbling over into orgasm, when the board took her in entirely.

The stars parted, their shape something like a vertical, spiraling mouth opening up before her, and darted down, closing around her. Their whispers resolved into English the moment Jasmine passed the threshold, stentorian and singular, a chorus of blazing voices spoken in tongues of fire that now licked over her body entire.

You have not been granted permission…

They kept stimulating her pussy, working harder and faster within the body of the board than they had outside. The first spasms of climax hit Jasmine just as the stars closed in around her, the jaws of the board snapping shut. Their light held her pinioned, shone upon every inch of her at once, voice and touch and intent sliding over her skin, penetrating her through, right to the nerves…

Where the board held the impulses of Jasmine’s precious orgasm frozen in place.

It went on and on, a plateau of pleasure without end. Was it enough? Was it a real orgasm? 

She genuinely couldn’t say.

Her pussy could not clench, not within the embrace of the light, her body trapped within the rising tightness of climax, in the beginnings of the first wave and unable to progress further. Desire still brewed in her, need unquenched by the low- too low- rumbling of sensation in her cunt. Tentacles ran their slick, writhing lengths over her body, the light kissed her endlessly, but no matter the stimulation, Jasmine could not ascend to the peak, nor subside back down to the frustration she had, unfortunately, become accustomed to.

Worst of all, within the body of the board, she understood what they wanted with her now.

‘No…’ She whimpered, unable to muster the will to yell before the patient, eternal light. She trembled, body twitching with feelings going on far longer than they ever had before. She shuddered, already feeling the board’s light working its way through the whorls and convolutions of her frustrated, denied being. 

For Mistress of the manor was not a person, but a position passed down over the many, many years that this land had been a hot spot for ghosts and a staging ground for whatever inscrutable plan her true employers had in their manifold mind. Like any high-ranked position there were rules, and expectations; there was an interviewing process, by which the board might find out whether the human body could be massaged into the form they desired. 

The current Mistress, down below and almost out of sight through the swarming star body, looked upon the first moments of Jasmine’s interview with understanding in her eyes, something that might once have been sympathy, but was now closer to envy. Her tenure as lady of the house would not be over for many years yet, the process of interviewing a new hire lengthy and transformative; Jasmine would be released from their embrace eventually, come out the other side more like the current Mistress than when she had entered, the Mistress herself free to return to that strained eternal pleasure in her place. 

How many of those stars, Mistress had wondered to herself in private moments, were themselves former Mistresses, held in one form of ecstasy or another, aching and immortally… happy? Surely not.

But beautifully, endlessly blissful? Yes, she very much thought so. 

For the moment though, the Mistress was still more a creature of the physical world than whatever other plane the board inhabited. She had certain…. Permissions not afforded to the staff, and with her slim body still fondled by her tentacles and the desperate, lightbound moaning of her maid cum replacement echoing outward from the starlit body she had pledged herself to…

Taking advantage of those permissions seemed welcome indeed.

Sinking to her knees, surrounded by a halo of tentacles, the Mistress looked into the light and the writhing, bound body it had swallowed, and far beneath the surface of the earth, the manor above echoing with the ghostly pleasures of a thousand captured souls, and began to touch herself. 

Hers was a quiet, lonely orgasm, ignored by the starlit creatures and their fastidiously denied captive. The board was bound up in its work.  
***


End file.
